Carving in the air

By BERNADETTE RAE

Remember the dance groups Te Kanikani o te Rangatahi or Taiao? Te Kanikani emerged in 1985 from one of the early work skills development courses, held in Freemans Bay, when the Labour Department was enthusiastically supporting arts initiatives. Taiao was its second incarnation, born in 1988.

Under artistic director Stephen Bradshaw, they both regularly rocked the rafters with their performances, which were sometimes spectacular, occasionally awful. They were never boring or mediocre and the Maori contemporary dance scene has been a far less lively place since their passing.

But by 1994 Bradshaw and most of his company were producing families as well as stronger individual identities. Growing financial responsibilities and the urge to explore individual paths of creativity brought Taiao to a natural end.

Now Bradshaw is back, choreographing a work for the emerging Atamira Dance Collective, founded in 2000 by Jackie Gray and a new generation of Maori artists.

Bradshaw's Mauri features in the collective's season, Atamira, which plays at the Maidment Studio from Wednesday. Gray and Louise Potiki Bryant are contributing the other works on the programme: Hail, choreographed by Gray, and Bryant's Te Aroha me te Mamae (The Love and the Pain). Mauri means "life essence or life force", says Bradshaw.

"In the Waitemata Harbour, for example, there is a mauri put in the water from the Pacific. It sits in a particular underwater area, to maintain the life force in that ocean.

"Mauri is also in people. We are that energy, as well as the land."

He describes the new work as an exploration of that force, in relation to the land, the sea and the sky, and as "a carving in free air" that has been a challenge well met by his five dancers, Dolina Wehipeihana, Louise Potiki Bryant, Moss Patterson, Maka and Corinna Hunziker.

It is Bradshaw's first choreography since 1994.

When Taiao came to an end, Bradshaw was drawn to dance education. He was disturbed by the lack of training and professionalism and saw his next contribution in teaching. He developed a portfolio of contracts with Northland Polytech, the New Zealand School of Dance, Unitec and the University of Auckland, which gave him a good national spread of influence he found intensely satisfying.

For the past 2 1/2 years Bradshaw has been a full-time community arts co-ordinator for Auckland City.

"I began to find the education sector extremely frustrating," he says, "having to watch new graduates pour out of their courses, with no jobs to go to."

He is now passionate about developing new infrastructures to support better employment opportunities for these young people, whom he describes as "talented, well trained, intellectual, and culturally aware in a way their predecessors never were".

"We need to value these people," he says, "and find smarter ways of working, of resolving the many areas of conflict within the dance world and to lift up our heads and see the bigger picture."

Bradshaw has been enthusiastically involved in developing a strategic plan for Maori contemporary dance that now exists with the aims of bringing people together under a learning umbrella, with intensive workshops, an annual meeting to learn from one another, and to have contact with key international indigenous people.

There is also a choreographic strategy, which provides an opportunity every year for two selected choreographers to produce a new work. Bradshaw's Mauri is one of this year's two works produced under the scheme, which is funded through Toi Maori. The second work is Merenia Gray's Te Mana, to be performed in Wellington later in the year. Next year Lou Potiki Bryant and Moana Nepia will step into the limelight.

"It means there will be at least two new Maori contemporary choreographies produced with proper funding and a proper process each year," he says. "In the days of Taiao we would get funding for three weeks to produce a work from conception to performance. I have been thinking about Mauri for three years."

Performance

* What: Atamira

* Where: Maidment Studio

* When: opens tonight at 6.00; then each night until Friday at 6.00